headsup: the blog

Thursday, August 29, 2013

Traffic and weather next

DETROIT (WWJ) - It’s back-to-school season and many Detroit teachers are struggling in the wake of budget cuts and overcrowded classrooms.

According to the National School Supply and Equipment Association, the average teacher spent at least $485 on school supplies for their classroom last year.

Ready for the buried lede?

So, what are some Detroit women doing to offset their struggles in the classroom? Well, they’re becoming “sugar babies” of course — seeking financial assistance from wealthy men online.

Ready for the methods section?

In the Detroit School District alone, more than 200 teachers are moonlighting as sugar babies to offset wage cuts and job losses, according to dating website SeekingArrangement.com. How do they know? The website tallied up all the females registered in Detroit who list “teacher” as their occupation.

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

In case you were wondering ...

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Are you ready for the big leagues?

Further to Ed and Picky's discussion below, here's a genuine tabloid hed (Boston Herald 2008; a lovely vintage). Can you tell who's doing what to whom? If you can, without peeking, you could be ready for a tryout on Planet Tabloid!

the
ex-Centerfolds dancer who had a two-night stand with Yankees cheater
Alex Rodriguez, was the waitress on duty at the 99 Restaurant in
Charlestown when five men were gunned down in 1995. - See more at:
http://bostonherald.com/inside_track/inside_track/2008/07/a_rod_gal_slay_witness_99_%E2%80%9995#sthash.KyMA5x0J.dpuf

"Exclusive" is a well-established newspaper noun, but I'd score it as an adjective here, which is something like a single in the top of the 10th after nine perfect innings. Otherwise, we're all nouns, all the time.

All the pesky grammar is over and above the question of why the Most Super-Important Story in the World for Post readers is the, ahem, Crown-endorsed MI6 death-by-Fiat plot to take Diana down for her plans to destroy Prince Charles by "releasing embarrassing information about his sexual peccadillos."

You just never know what you're getting when you sample a Murdoch product, do you?

Monday, August 12, 2013

Stopses and friskses

Q.
What is the plural of "stop-and-frisk" when referring to multiple
searches under that policy? Is it "stop-and-frisks," "stops-and-frisks,"
or "stops-and-frisk?" – from Storrs, Conn. on Mon, Aug 12, 2013

A. On first reference, stop, question and frisk policies or actions. On second reference, AP uses the shorter form, stops.

Some days it's hard to see how our friends at the AP even open the e-mail without dissolving in howls of derisive laughter (stopses and friskses, gollum gollum gollum). Really? "The latest in a series of stops-and-frisk involved a delivery driver bringing an order of Whoppers Junior to the inspectors general"? Still, it's a chance to let a style question produce a suggestion or two about style sanity, which is why the AP's answer is so useless.Nobody in the editing audience would be surprised to find that the AP doesn't read its own stylebook. Or, probably, that the AP doesn't even read its own copy, because the answer above -- like it or not, and I don't -- bears no resemblance at all to what the AP actually does. Today's lede (filed well after the question was posted) is one example:

NEW YORK (AP) -- The nation's largest
police department illegally and systematically singled out large numbers
of blacks and Hispanics under its controversial stop-and-frisk policy, a
federal judge ruled Monday while appointing an independent monitor to
oversee major changes, including body cameras on some officers.

That sentence would produce a sensible style rule: A preposed compound modifier that needs a conjunction -- "your sink-or-swim attitude really yanks my chain" -- probably ought to be hyphenated. (The clumsy NP "stop, question and frisk actions" is, thankfully, pretty rare, and at a quick Lexis glance, doesn't show up in AP texts at all.) But the AP isn't doing very well at settling on a style, as illustrated by this first-reference plural from May 3:Read more »

Sunday, August 11, 2013

No, but thanks for asking

See what happens when you go out of town for a couple days?* The Great Cliches are loose again and ravening for delight, and nobody wants to stop them. (To the surprise of almost no one -- can we have a show of hands out there? -- they're accompanied by stupid puns on players' names, and if your first guess at the cutline verb for the photo shown here is "celebrates," take a victory lap.)

As a reminder, then: Heds including the phrase "ready for some football?" are permanently banned, under all circumstances, forever and ever amen. Nor shalt thou ever be amused enough by the sort of plays you can make on people's names to put one in a headline. And no cutline unto the end of time shall ever say "celebrates" (or "reacts," or "looks on," or "gestures while he speaks") again. If some part of that is unclear, leave a comment, and someone on the staff will be right with you see that you are left on the midden for the wolves.

* Saw some but not nearly enough of the Philosophy School gang, did lots of Service to the Profession and Academy, saw too little of the old native city, presented the empirical version of some earlier posts.

Tuesday, August 06, 2013

Man editing tiger

Q.
I'm confused. In one case, you say you are inclined not to use a hyphen
for "copy editing symbols." Then a few entries later, you say to
include a hyphen for the compound modifier "copy-editing experience." In
both cases, "copy-editing" is a compound modifier. So what is the rule? – from Tallahassee, Fla. on Mon, Aug 05, 2013

A. The first is a noun phrase, no hyphen. The second is a compound modifier with a hyphen.

Yeah, good point. Whatever you do to the first one, do that to the second one too

Do we contradict ourselves? Very well then

OK, why not try it as one word?

Instead, we end up with a "rule" that's meaningless, mostly because it tries to make a technical distinction under which the two terms it distinguishes are, um, indistinguishable.

True, "copy editing" is a noun phrase: Copy editing is fun! So is "copy editing symbols"; it can be an object (a list of copy editing symbols) or a subject (Copy editing symbols drive journalism students nuts), but it's still a noun phrase. So is "copy-editing experience." So, for that matter, is "the copy-editing experience entailed by this year's take on your annual Thanksgiving column," and when you combine it with the VP "cost me half a millimeter of right molar, thanks," you have a sentence.When it comes before a noun, like "symbols" or "experience," "copy editing" is also a compound modifier. Several such compounds are usually hyphenated: noun-adjective (wine-dark sea) and noun-participle (man-eating tiger), for two. Style guides from Fowler through the AP remind us that hyphens aren't there for decoration but for meaning; they're how we tell deep blue water from deep-blue water.

If you want to read "copy editing" as a noun phrase rather than a noun-participle combination, it's as much a noun phrase in one example as the next. It's equally a compound modifier in both cases. There's no consistency in hyphens, true,* but if you can't have a little consistency in how you describe your grammar, the reader might conclude that all that copy-editing stuff is just smoke and mirrors anyway. And thus is another hill lost in the War on Editing.

Saturday, August 03, 2013

Bridle suite

An art review on Friday about “Winslow Homer: Making Art, Making History,” at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., misstated, at one point, part of the title of a Homer work on display. As the review correctly noted elsewhere, it is “The Bridle Path, White Mountains,” not “The Bridal Path, White Mountains.”

Let's look in on a slightly less spittle-flecked version of those claims: even if the numbers are valid, the craven librul media will spin them on command from KenyaChicago the White House. We had some questions at the time about the assertions of directional bias made by Kevin Hassett, director of economic-policy* studies for the American Enterprise Institute (and, by some wild coincidence, a Romney adviser). Here, he's discussing the two main Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys on employment, reported the first Friday of each month: the "household" survey, which produces the percentage called the unemployment rate, and the "establishment" survey, which tracks nonfarm payroll employment (expressed as jobs added or lost):Read more »

Man eatin' tiger

Dear New York Post: If you must make junior-high-level puns on people's names, and if you must commit your g-droppin', and if you must refer to your candidates by given name on second reference -- would you at least be so kind as to provide the hyphen that lets us distinguish a Scotsman eating blancmange from a Scotsman-eating blancmange?

Thursday, August 01, 2013

Well, which is it, young feller?

Isn't it nice when there's a copy editor to remind you of how things stand in the world at large? Say, if you work at the Washington Times and you need just the right context for a 1A story:

Deploying the rhetoric of class warfare against congressional
Republicans, President Obama warned Wednesday* that “social tensions will
rise” if Washington doesn’t take steps to reverse the growing gap
between wealthy Americans and the middle class.

"Class warfare" fits right in, but still -- could it have been just two weeks ago that the same reporter broke a major exclusive about ...

President Obama is known for choosing his words carefully, and one of
the words he rarely chooses to utter in public is “poverty.”

With
more than 46 million Americans living in poverty, and people relying on
food stamps at record levels, the president also talks infrequently
about “the poor” in his speeches and public comments. Compared with his
predecessors, Mr. Obama is far more likely to speak about the “middle
class” when promoting his agenda.Read more »